Engaging employees in the remote workplace

One of the top barriers to remote work according to business leaders. They wondered how their employees would stay engaged with their work and with each other if they were separated.

Enter 2020, where nearly everyone had to stop working or work remotely due to the global pandemic.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 74 percent of business leaders believe that at least some of their newly remote employees will not need to return to the office once the current crisis has passed.

Remote working has gone from a nice-to-have perk to a way of life for a considerable number of employees around the world. Taking what they learn from the crisis and applying it moving forward will be a road to success for many companies.

And for many executives, those lessons have included new ways to engage their workers.

It’s a good practice. Not only to make sure everyone is meeting their goals, but also to stay social with remote workers, as they can often feel isolated or forgotten about (especially if there are other workers who see each other in person, as will be the case when people start shifting back to working in the office in phases).

Knowing they will have an opportunity to speak to the team or have 1-on-1 meetings with their manager at regular intervals helps remote workers feel more plugged in to what’s going on, without putting the onus on them to set up meetings or request phone calls.

Routines, including regular meetings, also help remote workers with one of their pet peeves: a lack of work-life balance. Plus, meetings signal that it’s work time, and trigger people’s professional mode, the same way their commute used to.

At TeamViewer, we have an established time every day for everyone to gather (virtually) and participate in stretching and light exercise to unplug and make sure we’re still focusing on our health. We’ve also added more e-learning content and are investigating revamping our language learning strategy so employees can still work toward their career aspirations. It’s just as important for leaders to talk regularly about personal goals in addition to business objectives, especially now when future change is the only certainty.

Around the world, offices have come up with creative ways to maintain their culture and boost morale while being distanced:

• GitLab employees take regular virtual coffee breaks. They’ve even developed a bot that pairs employees up randomly for chats.
• Customer support company Help Scout spices up their video calls by letting everyone give virtual tours of their homes, like virtual show-and-tell.
• Many companies have devoted a Slack channel or other discussion outlet to be a “water cooler” so everyone can congregate virtually without the need for an official meeting. They may also devote channels to specific hobbies so workers can connect based on interest.
• Virtual pub crawls can spice up your next virtual happy hour, where the group visits a different interesting website on a shared screen every 15 minutes while having a beverage.
• Since remote work is on everyone’s mind, companies often take the opportunity to highlight their strategies and even their employees’ workspaces on social media.

With strategic and interpersonal strategies like these, your team could become even more cohesive and productive than working in the same office space.